ATLANTA — A leaked 47-message Slack thread has revealed that Kurt Degraw, a second-degree black belt and the owner of Lodestar Grappling in southeast metro Atlanta, spent Tuesday night quietly persuading the owners of three rival academies to raise their drop-in fees so that his own $45 rate would, in his exact phrasing, “stop looking predatory.”
Lodestar Grappling (142 members, $189 monthly, $45 drop-in) had been fielding complaints about its visitor pricing for roughly six weeks before Degraw opened a private Slack channel with the owners of three other gyms in the same metro region. The thread began at 8:11 PM Tuesday and spanned a little over three hours. Of the 47 messages, approximately 38 were from Degraw.
At 9:47 PM, he typed: “We’re all competing for the same visitors — if we all raise, we all win.” Four minutes later, at 9:51 PM, he added: “My $45 stops looking predatory when yours is $40.” He then sent a voice note. The voice note has not surfaced. Multiple recipients have confirmed that they have not listened to it.
The three gym owners on the thread responded in ways that would eventually require one of them to register a new LinkedIn.
Southern Cross BJJ, located in Sandy Springs and owned by Vince Hollohan, simply complied. By the following Monday, the gym had quietly raised its drop-in rate from $25 to $40, with no announcement on its website or its Instagram. Reached for comment, Hollohan said only, “Market research.” When a follow-up question asked what the market research consisted of, Hollohan replied, “I shouldn’t have said market research.” He has not posted since.
Crossroads Jiu-Jitsu in Decatur, owned by Moira Wellford, requested a coffee meeting with Degraw “to discuss the mutual benefit.” The meeting was cancelled ninety minutes before it was scheduled to begin, after Wellford forwarded the thread to her four instructors. Two of them teach as a second job. One of them said the word “bro” out loud for four full seconds. Wellford’s subsequent text to Degraw cancelling the coffee was twelve words long, including the comma, and is currently among the screenshots circulating via Instagram DMs across the region.
Ox Valley BJJ in Marietta, owned by Derek Holbrook, did not attend the coffee meeting, did not reply to the thread, and did not, by any conventional definition of the verb, handle it privately. Holbrook instead forwarded the entire 47-message thread to a popular grappling discussion forum, where it was removed within four hours for doxing. The original poster had not redacted a single name, gym, dollar figure, or private message. One moderator, messaged for context, described the post as “one of the cleaner violations I’ve ever had to take down.”
Screenshots have continued to circulate nonetheless, primarily via Instagram DMs among brown belts with strong opinions about visitor pricing. At press time, one screenshot had passed through at least six separate gym group chats within a thirty-mile radius of Lodestar.
Ox Valley’s public response went live Wednesday morning on the gym’s Instagram: it cut its drop-in fee from $25 to $10 and added a free loaner gi program for any visitor who had traveled more than fifty miles. The caption read, “We are excited to make the mats more accessible.” It has 2,341 likes, most of them from people who do not train in Georgia.
Lodestar Grappling’s own membership is reported down 8% over the past two weeks, according to two current members who also say the gym’s door code has been changed twice without announcement. Degraw’s personal Instagram account has continued, throughout the week, to post what the account describes as “community-driven pricing” content, including a seventeen-slide carousel on Thursday titled “The Myth of the Race to the Bottom.”
At 2:14 AM the morning after the leak, Degraw sent a private DM to one of the three recipients that read, in its entirety: “just kidding about the whole thing.”
That DM is also now circulating.
Lodestar’s official statement was posted Friday at 11:03 AM as an Instagram Story by the gym’s social-media manager, Callie Penner. The statement read: “There is context that is being misrepresented. We stand by our pricing.” The Story included a sunset photograph and, for reasons no member of the gym has been able to satisfactorily explain, a Bible-verse emoji.
Callie Penner has since deleted her LinkedIn.
Reached for further comment, Degraw declined to address whether a voice note exists, whether it is in any way worse than the texts, or whether any of the other three owners had been asked to raise monthly rates as well. He did, however, forward an unrequested three-page PDF of his personal lineage chart, which traces back to a 1978 judoka in São Paulo and appears to have been formatted in Microsoft Word. The final paragraph of the PDF, unprompted, reiterates that Lodestar’s $45 drop-in is a fair market rate.
As of Saturday morning, Southern Cross BJJ had quietly reverted its drop-in fee to $25. Crossroads Jiu-Jitsu had added a banner to its website that reads, “We Set Our Own Prices.” Callie Penner had resurfaced on LinkedIn under the title “Brand Strategist (Open to Opportunities).” And Lodestar Grappling had posted a new Instagram carousel titled “What Real Community Looks Like,” which consisted of fourteen photographs of its fourteen remaining regulars holding coffee.